The Spare Key: Third Lock Mystery (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798995176664)

The spare on her tagged board is lying next to a body.

Bess Ward cuts keys and opens other people's doors. She does not leave her tagged spares on mill-office floors.

In Third Lock, a Great Lakes canal town that still smells of oil and wet wood, the mill pay-office is found locked from the inside. Ray Deller, the museum director, is dead. Beside him is the spare Bess hung two days ago, after she serviced that cylinder herself.

Only three keys should exist. One is in the lock. One is Bess's spare, which is not on the board. The third is unaccounted for. Chief Rourke would like the shop to be the answer. Deputy Dan Holt would like a door that makes sense.

Bess is forty-four, six weeks in town, and good with pins. She is not cute. She is not a baker who stumbled on a body. She is the locksmith who did the job, and the job is now a locked room with her stamp on the floor.

The Spare Key is Book 1 of the Third Lock mysteries: clean, closed-case cozies about keys, copies, and the doors they open.